Black Friday starts on Thursday night this year. The term has been used before in non-commercial settings, as right after a market crash. I ran across this article discussing it's origin, and I thought some of you would enjoy it.

Philip Hudson wrote:Black Friday may have several meanings and etymologies. The Friday after Thanksgiving is called Black because the retailers hope the sales that day will get them out of the red.

I'll let the article speak for itself:

Like many widely accepted etymologies, this explanation is completely bogus. As linguist Ben Zimmer pointed out last year, the term "Black Friday" originally carried the negative connotations you would expect from such a phrase. One of the earliest known uses came from those worries about the Jacobite rising of 1745, and it was used again to describe the financial panics of 1869 and 1873.

It is also not the busiest shopping day of the year. It's in the top ten, but the early 20s of December beat it out.

Life is like playing chess with chessmen who each have thoughts and feelings and motives of their own.

Slava: I knew about the other Black Fridays, but why would the Friday after Thanksgiving be named after them? Just because I'm named Philip and I have a friend named Philip it doesn't mean he is my namesake, or I his. Our mothers might have had very different reasons for naming each of us. I stand by, “We’re hoping to be in the black by Black Friday,” the other sources notwithstanding. We just might not be defining etymology the same.

Then why would merchants in the early days of the use of the term for the day after Thanksgiving have fought against it?

Here's the very first sentence of the article:

Bloomberg's John Tozzi writes that retailers attempted to rename the day "Big Friday," but with little success. The name stuck, and businesses did their best to roll with it by inventing an alternative etymology.

Life is like playing chess with chessmen who each have thoughts and feelings and motives of their own.